


sunlight in a jar

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: An actual fic where they are actually into each other, Beginning middle and endgame Adam/Blue, F/M, Kissless intimacy, Money and class issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2018-12-17 04:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11844132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: She didn’t seem to have it in her to concentrate with Adam’s hand on her hip, thumb making the same two inch journey, back and forth, across the exposed skin above the waistband of her jeans, which she had embroidered with little grasshoppers herself.Her focus had narrowed only to that small patch of skin under the hard callus on the pad of Adam’s hand, and the heat pooling low in her in response. When she cut her eyes to the right to steal a sly glance at him, he did not turn his head, but she could see the start of a poorly repressed smile at the corner of his mouth and she allowed herself the fantasy for a minute of something else with him, of climbing onto his lap and getting between him and his work.Adam caught her looking the next time, and she could feel herself flush.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I very much like these two and wish there was more fic for them just getting a chance to be affectionate teenagers. Fell free to @ me on tumblr anytime (@katiewont) if you have any rarepair thoughts.

As soon as the words were out of Blue’s mouth, she felt like an idiot; unable to take it back, she barreled on: “I’m not saying you’re my  _ true love,  _ because, you know, that would be weird, but that just in case, I tend to not kiss anybody, just in case — Adam, if you could stop me that would be great because I seem to be incapable of shutting up.” 

Adam’s face did complicated math for a moment. “Well. Honestly, I can’t figure out if it’s better or worse than I was expecting.”

Blue’s gaze dropped to her shoes. “Better,” Adam amended quickly. He put his arms around her, and drew her in close. She rested her cheek against his chest, against his thumping heart, and he dragged his chin through the wild bramble of her hair. 

“I’m still annoyed,” she said, directly into his shirt. She listed off his transgressions: “You didn’t invite me to the Gansey’s event. You didn’t call me to tell me you were safe after the Ganseys came to get you.  _ And  _ you were very rude about why I didn’t want to kiss you.”

“I was an ass,” he agreed. It wasn’t quite an apology, but Blue was relieved enough that Adam was safe and sound and that now these words were out in the open between them… well, somewhere between all of that, she was happy enough to let it go. There was palpable glee in his voice when he added, “but I do have a terrible new car. Would you like to go for a spin?”

*

Blue doesn’t get why all of her raven boys drive stick shifts. “Well. Gansey’s in it for the aesthetic,” he said, slow and southern, and Blue was grateful. It meant something, she thought, when he relaxed his mouth around her. 

Blue pressed her mouth to the inside of her wrist to stifle a grin. 

“Ronan is in his dad’s car,” Adam said. Blue liked the way he looked driving, sure of himself and competent. Relaxed in a way she did not often get to see him. “And I’ve inherited this from Helen. Honestly, I’m not sure I can keep it. There’s registration and insurance to keep up with. The Gansey’s are sweet, but having that much money just atrophies their ability to be practical.” 

“Tell me about it,” Blue said, thinking of all the times Gansey was ridiculous or insensitive without meaning to be. And then, in a way that she could because she and Adam were both poor, she asked him, “But you’re going to enjoy it for the time being?”

As if to answer, Adam sped up; the odometer creeping up to sixty and then seventy before he let up and slowed back down. Blue’s heart raced along, and she and Adam shared a quick grin. “Why the hell not?” he said. There was a lot of road ahead of them, and Blue felt something inside of her still as the night dragged on. 

“They bought you a car,” Blue said, because the novelty and surprise still hadn’t worn off. “I’m a little surprised you let it happen?”

“Oh jeez,” Adam said, rolling his eyes. “You had to have been there. Imagine living in a universe where Helen Gansey drove, for even three minutes, this car. Let alone her college career.”

Blue couldn’t, of course. “Is that what they said?”

“It was insane,” Adam confirmed. “I think she must have spent hours looking for the most uniquely hideous car to find something I would accept as a total write off to her. Once I’d pictured Helen for the most hideous but still functional clunker she could find, I didn’t have the heart to turn her down.”

“Ganseys,” Blue said, amused. “Who can say no to them?” 

Adam cut his eyes to her. “You didn’t have any trouble.”

“He’s not done developing,” Blue said, putting her fingertips on the crook of Adam’s elbow. “By the time Gansey’s figured out how to not come off as a creep, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with.”

“Do you want to talk about Gansey?” Adam asked. 

“No,” she said. She felt a little flustered when she said, “maybe you could stop somewhere.” It was dark outside, just the starry canopy of the dark sky and when Adam pulled over and killed the engine, there was only the insect soundscape. 

Adam takes her hand. “So. You’ve had a long time to think about your...”

“Curse, I think. That’s what my mom calls it.”

“Your curse, then.” 

It was easier to talk like this, sitting in Adam’s misshapen car, both staring at the treeline and skies ahead. “I don’t want to be the kind of girl who has sex but hasn’t been kissed.” 

Adam audibly swallows beside her when she says the word  _ sex,  _ trying her best not to fumble. His thumb drags across the stretch of skin between her own and her forefinger. “Are you jumping the gun?”

Blue felt herself flush, and hoped Adam couldn’t see it in the low light. “You got frustrated because we weren’t kissing. I don’t have anything to … trade.”

Adam looked bewildered. “What? Blue — that’s not.  _ God _ .” 

“Isn’t it?” Blue asked. 

“No,  _ no, _ ” he said. Blue felt a small measure of relief, but didn’t stop staring at him, trying to press him into explaining without pressing him. He did relent, after an awkward lull. “I wasn’t sure you  _ liked me,  _ because, I don’t know. It’s not like you’re… Well. You’re not like Ronan.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. Um, super religious? And so when we weren’t kissing, I got insecure, like you didn’t really like me, and I was just the first person to want you and you wanted me around for that, but didn’t really want me.”

“That was still terrible,” Blue said, scowling, and Adam winced. His palm was sweaty, or maybe hers was. “Wait, are you saying Ronan is…?” 

“It’s not my place to say,” Adam said quietly, “but, I’m half-convinced he’s saving it, or planning on it. He gets really grossed out when his brother Declan sleeps around, and he’s definitely used the word  _ fornication  _ before, unironically.” 

A laugh bubbled out of Blue. “Okay, but isn’t he gay?” 

“Who’s being an ass, now,” Adam said, the ghost of a smile present. “You can be queer and a person of faith. We all have our crosses to bear.”

“Huh,” Blue said, and used her right hand to fumbled with the side of her seat until she found a lever. When she had it fully reclined, she turned to look at Adam in profile. He looked lovely and gaunt, and he followed suit, using the moment to discreetly wipe his palm of his denims before he reclined his own seat and take off his seatbelt. Blue liked looking at him, but had to close her eyes after a minute, feeling like he could see into her thoughts. 

“I do like you. I like being near you. I wish I could kiss you.” 

Blue felt Adam’s thumb touch her closed eyelid. “I’m glad… I like you too.” 

“I’m sorry I made you feel —” she wanted to say  _ shitty,  _ so that Adam would know she wasn’t dainty, that she could be just as coarse as any of the others, but the word was heavy in her mouth, and she substituted “crummy” at the last minute.

Adam let out a laugh. “You’re something else, Blue Sargent.”

When Blue opened her eyes, Adam had leaned in and was much closer than she’d anticipated. Her heart kicked into high gear, but she reminded herself: she had told Adam the truth, and he had believed her and would not kiss her. 

She was right: as soon as she was looking at him, giving him a small, slight smile, he leaned in and brushed her nose with the point of his. 

“Adam,” she said.

“I’m here,” he said. 

She could feel the thrum of him, and was relieved. It was satisfying, to have the knowledge of her uncertain future out in the open. She thought about all of the things she’d done in the past few months. She would not have to duck out of goodbye hugs early in fear that he might lean down and plant a kiss on her unsuspecting forehead, choked each moment by her warring desire to and aversion from talking about the elephant in the room. 

She brought her hand up to cup his face, putting her thumb at the corner of his narrow mouth. He put his hand over hers, warm and calloused. Cicadas screamed outside the window, and she was glad to exist. 

*

Adam walked her to the door when he brought her home, and gave her a warm, long hug before he shooed her inside. “You have to come back in the morning,” she told him, lingering half inside of her house. “Persephone is going to want to do a reading about what’s going on with you.”

Adam crooked a smile at her. “I’ll be here.”

He reached out, one last time, as if he were magnetized, as if they hadn’t spent the last two hours touching. He put his thumb against her bottom lip and made a gentle, dry swipe from one side of it to the other. She imagined she could feel the drag of his fingerprint, and touched her mouth where he had as soon as he pulled out of the driveway. 


	2. Chapter 2

Persephone’s advice had boiled down to two things. The first was that Adam should “take back dominion of the things he hadn’t offered” and the second was to give to the leyline what he had. Adam’s body was behaving poorly because he was not responding to the needs to the trees of Cabeswater, and the fact that that sentence made sense in the context of their lives now made Blue almost giddy. 

Then, Persephone and Adam had gone out alone, taking Maura’s car, not coming back until very late. 

After he and Persephone finished, Adam slept on the couch at 300 Fox way. At the end of his thirteen hour nap nap, he had sat up, bleary and disoriented. Blue had come home from school, and was still wearing her backpack, just stopping by the kitchen for a snack before she went to her room. She was there to witness the muzzy confusion. 

“Water?” she offered, stupidly charmed by the asymmetry of his hair. She wanted to put her fingers through it. Adam nodded mutely, and she ran the tap. 

By the end of his glass of water, Adam was sharper, more in focus. “I think I know what I have to do,” he said, avoiding her gaze shyly and reaching out to hold one of the straps of her backpack, instead. “Would you come with me?”

Which is how Blue had ended up in Adam’s car for a second time in a few days while Adam towards Cabeswater. This time she had her backpack behind her seat. “Have you talked to the Ganseys about, you know, what you’re going to do with this thing?” Blue asked, drumming her knuckles against the dashboard. 

Adam made a noise that obviously meant  _ no.  _

“Have you ever met a dog with mange?” 

Adam turned sharply to look at her, and then back to the road. His mouth was tucked into a half-smile. “I am familiar with a mangy dog, yes.” 

“Well. I don’t mean to be insulting, but... It’s kind of growing on me the same way?” 

Adam barked out a laugh. “You sound like Gansey.”

“No, it’s different.”

“Explain,” Adam said. 

Henrietta didn’t have a lot going for it: it didn’t have a movie theater or a good recycling center, but it did have gorgeous seasons. She stared at the treeline for a long moment while she thought about how she wanted to say it without being ugly towards their friend, even in secret between the two of them. “If you keep this car, it won’t be the same as what Gansey does with the Pig.” 

Adam coloured beside her. “Of course it won’t. You might — you can’t tell, but Gansey actually drives a really nice —” 

“Wait!” she said, and rushed to get the rest of her thought out before he could get too embarrassed. “I don’t mean, like, you know, your car is crummy and his is a, like, the girl that goes through a transformation where she just had to take her glasses off to be hot. But… Gansey’s falling-apart car is like… You know. When you do something but you mainly want other people to see you doing it?”

“Performative?” Adam suggested. 

“Exactly! The way he loves his car is performance art, because he’s rich and he’s all messed up about it. He wants people to know that he loves his car, even though he could just replace all of its guts and have a functional, well behaved one.” Blue said, “But like. This car. You’re right. I don’t know anything about it, but I know that Gansey’s car is a secret prom queen, or Ronan wouldn’t want to drive it so badly. But this car… someone didn’t give up on it, even though it isn’t obvious when you take its glasses off that she’s super hot under a coat of bad paint. Somebody loved this thing.” 

“Your metaphor is falling apart,” Adam said, but he looked pleased. Blue was in a cardigan that had once been a maxi skirt that was far too long for her. She and Adam were poor in such different ways that she wasn’t always sure that he recognized it on her, in the way she repurposed things and did without and shared bedrooms with too many cousins in her home’s rotating roster. 

“Maybe,” Blue said. “We don’t all have college dreams.”

Adam’s mouth twisted down, like she’d expect Gansey’s might. She wished he drove an automatic, so she could take his hand. Instead, she put her fingertips at his pulse, in the crook of his elbow. 

She’d wanted to talk to him about it since she’d had her meeting with her guidance counselor, but every time she touched the edges of the topic, made her flinch. It was weird to be embarrassed about her own lack with him, because he hadn’t let his circumstances stop him, and she wasn’t sure if he would empathize with her the way she wanted him to. 

Instead, she turned up his radio. He has a blown out speaker on the passenger side, so she doesn’t turn the knob past the halfway point. Country music. She quirked her mouth up at him and he smiled back at her, a little rueful. In Gansey or Ronan’s car, they’d be listening to Ronan’s racket. It was interesting to know something new about him outside the context of his friendship with the other two Alionby boys. 

“How do you know where we’re headed?”

“Something is pulling on me,” Adam said, flicking his blinker on and sliding into the left lane when the road narrowed. “The ley line. I can feel it when we’re headed in the right direction like I’ve been magnetized.”

Blue groaned. “I have literally been trying my  _ whole life  _ to bribe my way into magic, and here you are, part ley-line.” 

“What? How would you bribe yourself into magic?” 

“Bribe isn’t the right word. But like. You know. I’ve been copying all the psychics in my house since I could walk. I know all the theory behind all of it. I was hosting my own attempts at seances when I was eight. And  _ I  _ make whatever it is they do stronger. It’s not —”  _ fair.  _ Blue was going to say it isn’t fair, but no one knew that better than Adam. 

He might have known anyways, because he did not prompt her to finish. “I think we’re getting close. You made this much easier. It was a little harder with Persephone last night.” 

Blue squinted, wishing she had a pair of sunglasses with her. “Are we going to the state park?”

Adam flicked his eyes at the same sign she was looking at before directing his gaze back to the road. “Very possibly.” 

Blue made a considering noise, feeling embarrassed, and then plunged right in. She could never have said something like this to Gansey, but it was different with Adam. “I only have ten dollars on me. I — I didn’t think, when we left. Do you want to split admission with me?” 

“Admission?” Adam said, in a carefully clipped voice, like a city boy, and Blue knew the word had been a terrible surprise. 

“Yeah. I think it’s… ten, maybe? Or fifteen? It’s by-car. My mom and I came up this way last summer.” 

She could see the swell of Adam’s shoulder as it tensed beneath the stretched cotton of his white tee. “ _ God, _ ” he muttered. 

Blue felt the tension in the car mount, but she didn’t know how to put it right, didn’t want to tip them any further into chaos. Finally, she said, “I didn’t mean to assume...” she didn’t know how to finish that sentence, because she wasn’t sure where she’d misstepped. 

“Nothing is your fault,” he said, but his voice was still clipped. 

“You’re not acting like it, Adam.” Blue said, and felt embarrassingly Henrietta as she realized it had come out  _ actin.  _ She shoved that thought aside immediately. She wasn’t Adam — she wasn’t ashamed of the way her mother talked, or her aunts, half aunts, friends. Maybe during his formative years, something had taught him that a voice like that wasn’t capable of kindness, intelligence, or wit, but that hadn’t been Blue’s experience.  

His voice was frayed when he finally said, “How messed up is it that all I can think about it how glad I am that it’s you and not Gansey or Ronan with me.” 

Gansey, she knew, would have already put on his presidential personal as he tried to spin wholecloth a reason that he should be responsible for picking up the tab on this field trip. Ronan, well, she didn’t know. He’d find a way to be a dick, though. 

Adam looked at her and then past her to look at the next exit. “Yeah. Let’s split it, and I’ll make it up to you.” 

“You don’t have to make it up to me,” Blue said. “We could … consider it a date.” 

Adam shook his head, canines visible against his bottom lip in a fragment of a smile. “One of these days, Blue Sargent, I’m going to take you on a real date. You don’t have to settle for a leyline errand with me. Who knows what we’re going to have to do here.”

“I don’t mind,” Blue said, looking wistfully at the line of trees as they emerged. “I love the woods. And, like I said. I’m always on the fringes of interesting magic.”

“You do serve a pretty cool magical function, yourself,” Adam said. 

Blue pulled both of her legs up into the front seat with her to put her head on her knee before it occurred to her that it might be poor manners. By that point, the damage was done. She looked at him, vision half obscured by the way she had squished her face. She probably didn’t look all that cute. More like a miserable troll. “Not like that,” she said, glum.

“It’s been an insane year since I met Gansey,” Adam said. 

“What does that have to do with...” 

“I’m just saying, there’s a man that believes in everything. There’s — there’s magic out there for you, Blue. We just haven’t found it yet.” 

Adam’s words cheered her up a little. “Maybe,” she said. 

Near the park entrance, Adam thought he saw someone with a device similar to the one Gansey used to measure readings near the leyline, but then retracted what he’d said. 

“Cabeswater wants me to know someone is looking for the leyline. Someone else.” 

“That person, specifically?” Blue asked, pointing. She had not realized she was being particularly unsubtle until Adam snatched her hand down. 

“No,” he laughed. “I don’t think so. Just a general warning.” 

At the gate, when they went to sort out the money they needed to get in, Blue realized Adam was still holding her hand. They let go to sort it, with Blue producing seven dollars from her wallet, and Adam, eight, between the contents of his wallet and his cup holder.

“Can I tell you something?” Blue asked. 

Adam still looked flustered, as if the sheer act of handing eight quarters to the bored gate attendant had made his pulse spike. He followed the slow curve of traffic to the parking lot ahead, the slant and pace of it predictable enough to waste a few moments looking at her. “Go for Blue.”

“I used to be really into the Boxcar Children,” she confided, feeling like she was sharing something intimate. “And a few other books like them. Like, the Homecoming series.”

“Okay,” Adam said, with a puzzled smile. “I’m sort of familiar with the idea of the Boxcar Children, but not the other one.” 

“They’re like… I don’t know how to describe them. But a lot of it had to do with kids, like, being homeless or crossing the country and having twenty two dollars to do it.” 

“Sounds like poverty tourism,” Adam scoffed. 

“Rude,” Blue said, with a spike of annoyance. “I’m not a  _ poverty tourist.  _ And you’re not… ugh. Nevermind.” 

“No, don’t. I shouldn’t have said that.” 

Blue was quiet while he parked.  _ Why was she being so bad at this? _ She liked the look of Adam, liked that he liked her, liked the newly unfolding possibilities of getting to touch him and be touched back, now that he respected her desire not to kiss him and understood that it wasn’t because of her aversion to his soft mouth. 

“Okay, listen,” she said, trying again. “And try not to be such a  _ boy  _ for a minute. And  _ also  _ try to remember that we just made a collective decision to pick this forest instead of spending that ten dollars getting Big Macs, so my blood sugar isn’t about to  _ improve  _ any time soon.”

“You know you can get them to put mac sauce on a double cheeseburger,” Adam said. 

Blue did not want to laugh. “I’m not done yelling at you,” she said. “But that’s a good idea. We can still afford one of those before we go home.”

Adam opened his door, killing the engine, and held up a single finger to signal for Blue to wait. It took a moment for her to realize he was coming around to open her door. She looked at him with her mouth open. 

“It’s not about gender,” Adam said, holding out a hand. His voice was sly. “I have to help Ronan out of the car all the time.”

Blue thought about huffing past his obvious attempt to make peace with her, but then decided against that impulse. It was easy to keep boys at arms length when she didn’t care about them, at school or at Nino’s. That is not where she wanted Adam. She took his hand, instead. 

She had a purse with her that she had made out of an old pair of jeans. It had been all the rage when she had made them in middle school, and all of her friends had wanted one. Now they were considered dated and cheesy, but she was still fond of hers. Adam asked if he could put his tarot deck in it. 

“See, this is why boys need purses,” Blue joked. 

“Good point,” Adam said. “Blue, can I borrow your purse?” 

Blue put it over his shoulder, grinning. “Perfect,” she declared. The forest wasn’t particularly crowded, the late afternoon timing of their arrival meaning that there were more people leaving than showing up, but there was still some children and their parents on an after school adventure. Adam was a good sport, and the spattered light through the trees made Blue feel fond and warm. 

Adam led her, following some internal pull, but he let her stop to touch specific trees. She made small talk and greeted some of them, because some trees had more personality than others. She gave one a friendly peck, and when she looked up, Adam’s eyes had gone a little absent, the corner of his thumbnail between his teeth. 

“Will you tell me what you wanted to tell me about the Boxcar Children?” Adam asked her, after they had walked a while. 

“Okay,” she said, “but… don’t be mean about it again.” 

Adam inclined his head towards her, but did kept his lips pressed close together. 

“So you kind of know about the boxcar kids. They’d probably be really cheesy if I went back and read them now, but I was so intensely into their self-sufficiency, and the fact that they made their own home. I know that the books made being a homeless orphan seem cool. The other book, Homecoming was the same way. I didn’t really like the series as much as I liked that first book, but I always think of them when I have  _ just enough  _ for what I need. I asked my mom to cut my hair short the first time so I could look like Dicey.” 

Blue touched her hair self-consciously after she said it, and Adam’s hand followed hers, ruffling it in a careful way. She leaned into his touch. “How old were you?”

“Eight, nine, maybe.” Blue said. 

“I bet you were adorable,” he said. 

“She didn’t let me actually cut it until a year later. Well. Let me is the wrong word. I had really long hair at the time. It was  _ so long, _ ” Blue said, touching her waist to show him. “My mom kept saying I’d regret it, but then I botched it myself with sewing scissors and she had to bring me to a professional to kind of even it up. I gave myself a terrible bald patch in the back.” 

Blue felt exposed, like she could feel the wind on skin that should have been covered up. It wasn’t a terrible feeling, but it was lonely. She wanted to invite Adam. “What were you into at that age?”

“Transformers,” Adam said. “Army men. Encyclopedia Brown. Harry Potter, kind of.”

“I read Harry Potter with my mom,” Blue said. 

“My mom used to take me to the library,” he said. “Before everything fell apart. I feel like I’m lying sometimes when I talk about growing up because there’s a lot about my childhood I don’t really remember, but I know that it wasn’t always as bad as it was before I — moved out.”

Adam and Blue kept going, deeper into the forest. Blue knew little about navigation, but she liked the feeling of Adam knowing where he was going, by instinct, and they kept talking. It was pleasant, after that. Neither of them had a phone, but Adam wore his watch. Just after six, Adam said, “Whatever is supposed to happen, is supposed to happen here.”

“Okay,” Blue said. 

Adam and Blue looked around for anything obvious, Blue touched a sapling with light fingertips. “What do you know?” she asked it. 

“It might not speak english,” Adam pointed out. 

Blue scowled at him, still petting the little sapling. “Feel free to chat with it.”

Adam said something to it, haltingly. 

“I hate that you guys can do that,” Blue said. 

“Talk to trees?” Adam asked. 

“No. I mean, that, too, jeez. No, I was just thinking. I took Spanish in middle school and then two years in high school, and I can, like, kind of say some stuff to describe some family members. How are you conversational in  _ latin?  _ Who practices with you?”

“Just each other. Mostly Gansey. Ronan’s ability seems to come from some other plane. Also, if it helps, I didn’t say anything interesting or complicated to the tree.” 

“What did you say?” 

“I asked it if it thinks you’re as attractive as I do.”

Blue felt a flickering, warm thing take shape inside of her. “What did it say?” 

Adam rolled his eyes. “It hasn’t reached sexual maturity yet. It didn’t understand the question.”

Even in the context of his sentence, Blue felt herself shiver when she heard Adam say the word  _ sexual.  _ She realized after staring at him too intently that he’d been joking. She shoved at him with her shoulder, which didn’t come anywhere near his. 

They joked a bit longer, Blue feeling a curious aching behind her sternum, and Adam finally got out his deck. He had placed it in one of the denim pockets on the side of her purse, so she didn’t have to worry about him seeing any of the embarrassing odds and ends that she probably had in her purse. She was prone to picking things up and assuming she’d deal with them later. Later rarely arrived. 

“I hope you know what some of these mean,” Adam said, moving the cards around in his hands. 

“I know a thing or two,” she said. “Let’s see what your forest wants.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come tumbl with me @katiewont because i literally ship everything and would love to talk to you about your otp


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the short chapter. I had a bad day at work yesterday and I was like GET THIS NONSENSE OUT OF MY FACE. :)

Adam and Blue finished the leyline’s bidding that night, completely filthy. Blue’s leggings would probably never recover, but her mood was climbing on the breeze as they finished. “McDonalds,” she demands, cheerfully, when they get into Adam’s car. “That’s going to fix all of my problems.”

Adam cut a wry look at her. “Will it, now?” 

“No,” she admitted, “but it will hold me over until we get back to my house, where I keep my yogurt.”

Adam groaned. 

“There are probably other things in the fridge,” she said. “I’ll grill you something.”

Adam had dirt across his cheekbone. Blue almost used her thumb to wipe it away, but when she looked at him across the car, she realize he didn’t look scuffed: he looked like a champion. She kept her hands to herself. 

He wasn’t wrong: putting mac sauce on a double cheeseburger was a divine idea. They split a freshly refilled sweet tea on the way home, and Blue thought she might become part of the seat as she curled up, exhausted. Her whole self fits in the front seat. 

“I can’t believe I slept through class,” Adam said, groaning.  

“You needed it,” Blue said. “You had a whole thing,” she waved her hands to encompass the entirety of wandering eight miles in DC in a fugue state. 

“Humiliating,” Adam said, a single word that sounded pried from him. 

“I don’t know any seventeen year olds under your level of stress,” Blue told him. 

“College isn’t going to pay for itself,” Adam said. 

“I don’t think I’m going to get into college,” Blue said, drunk on the intimacy of the day, and still reeling from Adam using the word  _ humiliating  _ like a confession. “Or pay for it, if I do.”

“Oh,” Adam said. He didn’t say anything else, and Blue was glad he didn’t do anything idiotic, like try to reassure her she’d get in  _ somewhere.  _ He’d probably get into his first choice. His first choice would probably send him a fruit basket or a monogrammed towel to sweeten the deal — Blue didn’t know what big, important schools did when they really wanted a teenage boy to accept their offers, but if there was a protocol in place, they would set it in motion for Adam Parrish. 

“Sorry,” Blue said, rubbing her face on her knees, “I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”

“You didn’t. I’m — I’m pretty used to feeling the way you’ve described. It’s always a low level anxiety. But then every so often my brain stages a coup and it’s all I can think about for four hours.”

“You do not,” Blue accused. 

“I know there are definitely schools I can get into, probably. I mean. The big ones, I worry about getting it. I’ll be crushed if I almost killed myself in high school not to get where I want, and have to go to a safety. But paying for school, you know I spend most waking moments about that.”

Blue made a low hum. “The fact that it costs thirty or fifty dollars to even  _ apply  _ is messed up.”

“Yes. You’re not wrong, but you can get a few waived officially, and to be honest, I’ve sent out a bunch of emails to admissions offices that are basically fancy ways of saying, hey, if I’m poor, can you waive that?”

“What do they usually say?”

“It depends. A lot of the bigger schools will just be like,  _ yep, that dog hunts. _ Sometimes, they’ll email me back, like,  _ okay but how poor exactly?  _ And on paper I have a very complicated poverty, so if there’s any pushback, I just pay them. But out of ten schools I’ve applied to, I’ve only had to pay for three of them.

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I can forward you the email template, if you like.” 

“Yeah, thanks,” she said. Her brain was still caught on  _ complicated poverty.  _ She wasn’t sure what that meant. It seemed straightforward enough to her, and to the other Aglionby boys who seemed to endlessly want to to chip in to Adam’s upkeep, not that he accepted it. 

“And, you know, if you need some help sorting out, like, school that use the common app, or studying for the SAT...”

“That’s very nice,” Blue said, dubious. “I appreciate it, but you don’t have to. You’re so busy.”

Of course, she couldn’t let Adam into that part of her life. It was one thing for Adam to know she didn’t have any money, because he didn’t have any money either. She could not possibly reveal to Adam, who was a genius, that she wasn’t going to get into school, that her grades had been mediocre at best, that getting all the way to the end of a book, even one she thought was exciting, was a struggle. It was one thing for a boy to know you had second-hand shoes, and another to talk about your second hand brain. 

“The offer’s open,” Adam said. “I definitely didn’t have room in my schedule for a quest for a dead king, and then I decided I did, and magically, it was so.”

“It was so,” Blue repeated, smiling. “You sound like Gansey.”

“There are worse people to be like,” Adam said, returning her smile. She fell asleep on the drive home, warm and safe in the passenger seat. 


	4. Chapter 4

There was something neither of them had expected about driving back up to Fox Way: the Pig was idling noisy in the driveway. 

Blue had woken up from her nap when they got closer to her house, so they both noticed when they drew close to the house. “What the ...” Blue said, trailing off. “Is Ronan sitting alone?”

“Maybe he’s in time out,” Adam suggested. 

Blue was amused by the thought, but she thought it more likely that Ronan, who had some kind of religious hang-up about all the supernatural activity that happened inside, had refused to go in. 

“Is it weird that I’m sort of nervous?”

“No,” Adam said. They’d slowed down on Fox Way, presumably because the shock of seeing the Pig in her driveway had made them both realize that there would be no lingering in the driveway, idly chattering and resisting the urge to press her mouth against him, or finding some sort of suitable alternative. “We’ve been through a lot of weirdness. Our latin teacher tried to kill Gansey.” 

Adam couldn’t have gone any slower down Fox Way without putting his car in park. They made it slowly, getting halfway to halfway over and over again until Adam pulled up behind Ronan, who by now was staring at them openly. Blue wiggled her fingers at him in a flippant wave; Ronan waved back with only one. 

“He’s a national treasure,” she muttered. “Gansey definitely put him in time-out.”

“Lynch,” Adam said, rolling his window down from half-mast all the way down. 

“Parrish,” Ronan returned. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Well,” Adam said, spreading his hands expansively. “I find myself here, now and again. What are you guys doing here?”

“Dick has some business with the witches,” Ronan said. 

Adam started to protest, but Blue tapped on his wrist. “Not the most offensive thing they’ve been called.”

“Have you been kicked out?” 

“I’m just taking a smoke break.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“Seems like a good enough time to start,” Ronan said, grinning, with teeth but no heart. Blue leaned across the center console to bump her nose against Adam’s jaw, before leaning away. “I’m going to go see what he wants with my mom if you want to wait out here with Ronan.”

Adam nodded without looking her way and she moved to scoot into the house. She was stopped, however, by a flustered looking Gansey, moving out of her door and down the drive entirely too quickly. 

“Jane!” he said, almost knocking her over. 

“Gansey,” she greeted. “What are you doing here?”  

“Oh. I had some questions for your mother,” it was dark, so she wasn’t sure if she was imagining the flush she thought she saw staining his cheeks. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. 

“I hope you’re all sorted, now,” she said. 

“One can never be too sure about one’s future.”

Blue was indifferent to the future, except the bits that were terrifying and dreadful. The parts that involved Gansey definitely fell into the latter camp. Blue tried not to look obviously anxious at how he’d mentioned it. “So I’ve been told by the visitors here,” she said. 

“Would you like to accompany Ronan and I to Monmouth?” Gansey asked. He looked cordial and overwhelmed. He was wearing his wire rim glasses, which always helped stir Blue’s compassion for him. 

“I’ve got plans with Adam,” she hedged. “If he wants to come.” 

“Of course,” Gansey said. He winced a bit while he said it. Blue had the impression that he and Adam still hadn’t recovered from their fight over the weekend at the Gansey’s but they moved away from the house together. They landed in between the two cars, Ronan in the Pig’s passenger seat, and Adam in his own driver’s seat, just a few feet away. They were all in conversational distance. 

“Gansey,” Adam said, not as warmly as he could have, but not as chilly as Blue expected. Gansey looked relieved. 

“Adam,” he said. They looked at each other too long, but in the end, Blue and Adam followed them to Monmouth. 

* * *

When they got back to monmouth, the Gansey that awaited them wasn’t any of the versions of Gansey that she had come to like. His posture was that of a trained gymnast, and his shoulder tight, and Blue could feel the fight brewing. Ronan had slinked off, far enough that he wasn’t at Gansey’s heels, but he hadn’t crossed the threshold into his room. It was a foreboding distance. 

“The thing is,” Gansey said, perfectly measured. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the two of you to go off together alone.”

Blue immediately bristled, but Adam spoke first, “Gansey, if I’d wanted to succumb to your benevolent leadership, I probably would have moved in and installed a cot under the other boxes of your stuff.” Blue found that he became even more handsome when he finished, righteous anger and confidence polishing him until he shone. 

Ronan, hovering on the threshold of his own door, huffed out a laugh. 

“And you don’t get to decide who I go out with because—” Blue started, feeling the heat on the back of her neck. 

“Wait!” Gansey said, putting up his hands. “I don’t want to tell you you can’t do anything. The problem is that neither of you guys have a phone.”

Blue is still cresting that surge of attraction when Adam says: “Hasn’t really been a problem for me, so far.” 

“You guys could get on my family plan, and then we would all be reachable. In case of emergency.”

Adam and Blue shared a look, and it was worth the world to her to know that they were both of the same mind. They shared information like they were two poles, strung up with a power line between them. That Gansey was only an insufferable ass on accident, and that the Gansey way was not to bring up a problem unless you have the means and the dedication to handle the situation.

“Gansey,” she informed him. “You have suggested a bananas insulting idea.” 

She had learned something as a waitress, that she could be more frank with her customers if she used some sort of linguistic wiggling, but sometimes it backfired. It allowed her to convey, sometimes, the spirit of  _ screw you,  _ if not the letter of it. Using her alternative vocabulary into her everyday life, people tended not to take her seriously. Or perhaps that was a function of her physicality and gender. She wondered if people would take Ronan just as seriously if he said  _ bananas  _ instead of  _ fucking  _ on occasion.

Speaking of Ronan, it occurred to her to look at him. It left her a little off-footed, because usually they looked at Gansey to temper whatever was going on with Ronan. Ronan resolutely avoided her eyes. 

She ogled him openly. “Ronan? Do you have something you’d like to add?” because he had clearly been privy to this meeting, most tellingly because he’d yet to mock Gansey for suggesting that she and Adam get on the  _ Gansey family phone plan.  _

“Gansey did get kidnapped at gunpoint. And Declan and our priest got jumped about a month ago,” Ronan said, shrugging and kicking the door frame of his bedroom. He directed the last part of his list at Adam without looking at him: “And you refused to let me teach you how to fight.”

“Okay,” Blue said brightly, latching on to that last part and wilfully ignoring the rest. “How about you teach  _ me  _ how to fight and then one of us will be super prepared in case of danger?” 

Ronan’s forehead lines didn’t go away, but a corner of his mouth turned up and he murmured, “that’s the spirit, pipsqueak.”

“Also maybe I could get a taser,” Blue said. 

She meant it to be shocking and hilarious, but no one laughed. Gansey looked sad and serious and said, “Would it be similarly  _ bananas insulting  _ to offer to buy you a taser?” 

She had to consider this. “Would it be a one time thing? Not like, a monthly subscription to a taser service?” 

Gansey’s smile seemed less tense now that he was no longer pinned under the full wrath of her annoyance. “I promise, just the one.” 

“I’m going to get a taser,” she told Adam, grinning, to answer Gansey’s question. It seemed a small battle to lose. 

Adam looked flushed, but he said, “That’ll be a sight.”

* * *

After that, some of the tension seemed to settle and they went back to the wall where Gansey kept a blown out sat map. Adam and Blue marked off where the had been earlier, on their leyline errands, and Gansey asked questions and lamented the fact that he hadn’t been able to get his friend from Montana to leave his campground. 

It seemed to be a story that Ronan and Adam had heard before, but Blue didn’t know what they were talking about. 

“You should have just bought a convertible, fuckwit,” Ronan said, amiably enough. 

“I did not exactly have unfettered access to that sort of buying power right after I’d turned sixteen,” Gansey said. Blue was delighted to hear that Gansey’s had encountered problems before that his seemingly boundless wealth had not been the answer to. 

“Why would a convertible have helped?” Blue asked. 

Gansey explained to her about the boy that had been struck by lightning and could find his leyline so long as he was singing, how he’d spent days with him hiking the line and learning Bob Dylan songs. His mouth made a wistful shape when he spoke, but he did not say the boy’s name. 

This was what she’d learned about Gansey since falling into his orbit: he could find what was charming in almost anyone. It did not take much for Gansey to throw the whole weight of his esteem behind a person, and although he could be a thoughtless ass sometimes, where money was concerned, he genuinely did not mean to be. It was no wonder he attracted so many friends, so many misfit toys: his good will could be intoxicating, especially if you’d not encountered anything like it before.  

“But  _ now, _ ” she said. “Could you go get him?”

“In the summer, perhaps.” She pictured him, driving from Henrietta to Montana, and then back with the top down the whole time, taking a moment to picture herself in the fantasy. She’d be best to get Ronan’s haircut beforehand, because her hair was a terrible inconvenient length when it was windy. She shook herself out of her stupid fantasy, remembering with slick dread what her Aunt Neeve had said to her, all those months ago. 

When her stomach started to grumble, she asked Adam if he’d mind taking her home, and he excused himself quite readily. 

“What a day,” she said, and held his hand on the way to the car.

“You’re telling me,” he groaned. “I’ve basically got nothing done since we got back from DC.” 

“You fixed the leyline. Well. You’re fixing it.” Blue said. 

Adam rolled his eyes, but she could tell he was amused. “Of course that seems like the most productive thing I could be doing, you’re basically a wood nymph. I saw you kiss like, nine trees in the state park.”

“They looked lonely,” she grinned back. She wished she could kiss Adam. If she were honest with herself, she probably could, but then she would know what fate had to say about her current situation. (She didn’t believe in a single  _ true love,  _ anyway, with her mom in love with the other women in her house and room left over for Blue’s father in her heart, sixteen years later, but it would sting to know for sure fate’s opinion.) 

Instead, she crowded him against the driver’s door, inching forward while he inched back, wide eyed. She stopped just shy of actually crushing him, and tipped her head up. She was close enough that Adam almost went cross eyed looking down at her, and she tilted her face up to knock her chin into his chin. He knocked back, like a docked boat, and laughed, a little bit.

She put on a voice meant to be a sultry whisper and asked, “Can I drive home?”

“Probably not,” Adam said, winding his arms around her lower back. The touch filled her stomach with an effusive heat and tension. Being pressed to him him was fascinating; she could feel the waistband of his jeans across her stomach, and thought  _ yes please _ . “I think I’m on the Gansey’s insurance, and I haven’t figured out what to do with that situation yet.” 

“Probably for the best,” Blue said. “I can’t drive a stick anways.”

_ You can hardly drive an automatic,  _ she pictured him saying, but instead, what came out was, “We’ll fix that soon,” like a promise.

It reminded her of something else. “Hey. We’re on the same page, right? That we don’t want to be on the Gansey AT&T bill?”

“Of course, Blue, fuck,” Adam said, with feeling, and then seemed to regret it. “Sorry, I meant.”

“No,” Blue said. “Don’t apologize. It was. Um. Hot.” 

Adam let out a low groan, and that was overwhelming for a different reason. Not only was the aesthetic of it (which was, rest assured, something Blue was very interested in) but she could  _ feel  _ the rumble of it.) “Blue. I haven’t done homework in days,” he said. “I called out of work yesterday.”

“Are you accusing me of being distracting?” Blue teased, high on her own endorphins. 

“You have no idea,” Adam said, and took her home.  


	5. Chapter 5

With Adam living at St. Agnes, it went without saying that he wasn’t to bring girls home to his upstairs apartment alone, and Blue’s house was full to the brim with psychics who were all either nosy, noisy or both. It left them very little time for the kind of private exploration Blue wanted to experience with Adam, but he had a way of bringing her body to life like a ringing bell with the simplest of gestures.

On Wednesday they all went out to Cabeswater, enjoying the sun and the shared strain of the leyline’s tasks.

After, when they ended up by unspoken agreement to land at Monmouth together, there was a warm calm. They all fell into their own tasks; Gansey was clattering at his keyboard with the joyful abandon of someone with hundreds of words lined up, his brain racing ahead of his hands. She and Adam were sharing the monmouth couch, Adam at the far end of it with his book propped up on the arm, which freed his left hand to curl around her. Blue had been holding her own book, idly flipping through it without ingesting any of it.

It was a book Blue had picked up from the Henrietta public library. Not the library at the school, which was small and only contained books that you could be quizzed on through the AR system. She’d already had it extended once, but she was determined to return it before the due date came around again, and she’d thought perhaps today she would be able to finish it, except.

She didn’t seem to have it in her to concentrate with Adam’s hand on her hip, thumb making the same two inch journey, back and forth, across the exposed skin above the waistband of her jeans, which she had embroidered with little grasshoppers herself.

Her focus had narrowed only to that small patch of skin under the hard callus on the pad of Adam’s thumb, and the heat pooling low in her in response. When she cut her eyes to the right to steal a sly glance at him, he did not turn his head, but she could see the start of a poorly repressed smile at the corner of his mouth and she allowed herself the fantasy for a minute of something else with him, of climbing onto his lap and getting between him and his pages.

Adam caught her looking the next time, and she could feel herself flush.

She lived with too many psychics; she had no idea why she’d even briefly entertained the thought that she was safe to just linger in her risque thoughts so close to Adam. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he _knew_ what she was thinking. After he looked away, mouth curling even more, he let the nail of his thumb scrape against the skin just barely inside of her waistband and she bit her lip against the instinct to breathe in a deep lungful of air. The gloriously warm torture of it was a slow pull for an hour until Gansey finally stood up with a stretch, and Adam gave a very convincing performance of Studious Boy Intent on Reading His Scholarly Text.

* * *

“I have something for you fuckers,” Ronan told them, not long after their day (date?) at the national forest.  

Blue felt her stomach thrash like a goldfish. Blue was not keen on accepting anything from either of her millionaire friends, but with Ronan, there was the added edge of terrible possibilities. She swallowed that down, feeling safe that the truth would come somewhere between the two insane possibilities, and that, being Ronan Lynch, the gift would be ultimately harmless.

“Which fuckers?” Gansey said. He had that impish, playful look about him, like a painting titled _Gansey the boy with the lingering sensibilities of presidential candidate Richard Gansey the Third._ Blue suspected that was one of Ronan’s favorite Ganseys, because his mouth jerked into a sudden grin as he co opted Gansey’s own mannerisms by snapping and pointing at him.

“All of you fuckers,” Ronan clarified. “Close your eyes.”

There were levels of obedience between them that Blue missed by closing her eyes obediently, but she heard Ronan’s voice deepen as he growled, “Shut ‘em, Dick.”

At which point, Blue began to doubt her own naivety. If _Gansey_ didn’t trust Ronan not to put a slug in his hand, perhaps she should peek. She opened one eye a fraction to see Ronan placing something in Gansey’s hand, using his own to curl Gansey’s fingers around it. With no one’s gaze obvious on him, he looked a little less guarded. Blue could see the amusement without the filthy edge that usually accompanied it. She squeezed her eyes closed as he turned to do the same for Adam, and then felt the soft weight of something placed in her own hands.

Blue’s eyes flew open again.

“Are these _walkie talkies?_ ”

“Everybody, open your eyes,” Ronan said, dryly. “Blue Sargent has spoiled the surprise.”

“To be fair, they _were_ already in everyone’s hand.”

Ronan repeated what she’d said in a mocking tone.

“Ronan,” Adam drawled, looking down at the tool in his hand. He lifted it to his mouth and spoke into it: “Did these come from your head?”

Ronan lifted his own to his mouth. “Yes, you dumb shithead,” he replied. At the same time, his voice piped out of everyone else’s radios, only instead of the word _shithead,_ a sound came out, like the sound that blotted out people swearing on daytime TV. Adam and Gansey shared a delighted look.

Ronan’s entire body took on the visage of a wet cat, offended and horrified, claws out and shoulders drawn together. “What. the. fuck,” he said, decidedly _not_ into his walkie talkie.

“Well,” Gansey said, into his. He was grinning. “What a unique invention. Testing, testing, one-two bastard?” The walkie talkie relayed the message with no interference.

“Bastard,” Ronan repeated back, and a bleep bled from the other three’s speakers.

“This is the best day of my life,” Blue said.

“They’re clearly defective,” Ronan scowled, betrayed by his own machinery. “Everyone throw them away.”

“No way,” Blue said, hugging hers to her chest. It was not lost on her that Ronan had solved several of their problems at once, from Gansey’s worry to she and Adam’s communication struggle, without spending any money. “They’re lovely. Thank you, Ronan.”

“They’re backstabbing bitches, is what they are,” Ronan said, filtered through his walkie talkie again, and again, he was denied the pleasure of hearing the word _bitches_ in his own voice.

Blue did not like the word _bitches._ She did not like it when Orla said it playfully, and she did not like to hear Ronan toss it out. She spoke into her own walkie talkie. “ _Bananas_ rude,” she said, and found the word _bananas_ was also on the no fly list. “Nevermind, you’re right. Mutineers, all of them.”

* * *

There are other things take up her time, too. Somehow, Blue had lived seventeen years without close friends in her age group, and in the space of a few months, becomes cemented into the insane cast of monmouth, the Aglionby boys she’d always called bastards, with their all encompassing friendship and their quest for magic.

And when they _aren’t_ hunting for Owen Glendower, she’s still squeezing them in around her odd jobs. Gansey comes to pick her up from work unexpectedly from Nino’s on a night it rains hard enough to make a very unpleasant bike ride home, Ronan teaches her how to throw a punch, Noah tags along with her to walk dogs, most of which can see him.

Which is to say, somewhere between her friends and questing and leyline errands and work, summer school is her lowest priority. And somehow, even though Adam also works three jobs, he notices.

She knows this because he invites her to tag along while he does something on the leyline, and picks her up from Mountain View, and when she goes to leave her school bag in his back seat, he picks it up and gives her a _look,_ at which point she catches on. “Parrish!” she yawps. “Did you bring me out here to trap me into doing _homework?_ ”

“Trap seems like a strong word,” Adam says, shouldering her bag so he’s wearing both of them and striding away from her. “You’re in sturdy shoes. If you wanted to hike away from your homework, that works too.”

“You are the worst,” Blue grouses, but rushes to catch up with him. She’s not even sure you call it _homework_ when what you’re really doing is trying not to mess up your second chance at passing algebra two.

“You’re going to take that back after I show you something,” Adam says, louder and more expansive now that they’re getting properly into the woods.

“There had better be a really badass plant.”

“There are other things to be impressed by.”

“Sure. I like plants that react to touch, and color changing fish, and, you know, I would like just the once for a tree to speak english.”

“If you could talk to trees,” Adam smirked, “you would break up with me, drop out of school and live in Cabeswater. They probably _do_ speak English, but are only using Latin for your own good.”

Blue jostled Adam with her shoulder after another burst of speed to draw level with him. “Alright, punk. Lead the way.”

Adam’s eyes darted sideways, like he was making sure she was with him. “I promise this will be worth it,” Adam said.

“I’m following you,” Blue confirmed, blowing out a huffy breath that nudged against the hairs hanging from her own forehead.

It took Adam a while to say, “Okay, this is it,” and put down their things. She didn’t know what was in Adam’s backpack, because it was summer for him, a summer that was limited only by his working hours and being Cabeswater’s man on the ground and searching for Glendower. She envied him those extra four hours a day he did not spend they way she did, feeling suffocated at a cramped Mountain View desk.

He took out a blanket she recognized from monmouth, sturdy with a texture like terry cloth and spread it, knobby side down.

“Come sit with me, Blue.”

Blue did, on the edge of it.

Adam’s backpack was almost shapeless, now that he’d taken the blanket out of it, but he fished something else out of it, small, plastic, and full of sand.

“Is that an hourglass?” Blue boggled.

Adam grinned, sheepish. “Well. You know. It’s not like our watches work out here, so I found it in a box of Pictionary at Goodwill.”

“So,” Blue said, pulling the word out for much longer than it deserved.

“So, if you’d like,” Adam said, touching the back of his neck — it distracted her: his haircut was uneven, and Blue thought she might be able to fix it — “we could hang out for five minutes, and then you can tell me what it is you didn’t get about this class for five minutes.”

Blue wanted to turn the hourglass over to time out a five minute groan when Adam confirmed that he’d brought her out to the woods, the beautiful magic forest where the trees spoke with Adam and the magic of the land politely requested that Adam fix what was wrong, to study, but she had to admit, as teenagers with almost no access to private indoor spaces and limited free time spent not working or with their friends, she did want to _hang out._ With him. Alone.

She would accept his terms, she thought, and then when five minutes were up, she would do her best to tempt him into _not_ thinking about math.

He sat down and she took his hand, tracing his palm the way her mother might, if the client didn’t know what he looking for. Blue didn’t know what she was looking for, either.

Adam let her have his hand for a long minute. “What do you see?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a psychic.”

She thought about it, though, brushed her fingers over his callouses, the scar near his thumb. The bitten edge of his pinky nail and the blue spot on his index finger, which was probably an inkstain. Adam’s hands said that nothing had ever been easy for him, and she liked that.

When she didn’t say anything, Adam moved them so that he was instead holding hers, and unfurled her hand. He traced the crease of her palm and then the curve at the base of her thumb, and onto the soft, ticklish runway of her wrist. She felt her fingers twitch in response, and, mystified, he tried it again until she laughed, hand spasming open and closed. “You’re short circuiting my arm,” she said, and by some mutual understanding, the ended up reclining, both staring up at the same late-afternoon sky, holding hands in the quiet.

“It feels like it’s been five minutes,” Blue whispered, regretting it even as she said it.

“Take a look,” he said, and when she turned her head, she saw a single grain of sand, suspended.

“Cabeswater?” she asked, already knowing the answer. Something inside of her was zooming.

“Cabeswater,” he confirmed. “I came out here a few days ago and I said, listen, I’m really enjoying this wildlife labor vacation but I still have bills to pay, so I am going to have to figure out to get an extra few hours in the day.”

“So you just… asked for them.”

“I did,” Adam said.

“And then you…?”

“I took a nap on tuesday. Today, I was thinking I could not-kiss my girlfriend.” He hardly even stumbled over the word. Blue liked it a lot. She liked a lot about him, his pretty face, the curve of his shoulder when he set it against a rock he wanted to move, the way he didn’t let Gansey pay for things, the way he held his own against Ronan, the way his mouth looked when he swore.

“I think that’s a good plan,” she said. He reached across her and put his calloused thumb against her bottom lip. Blue’s eyes fluttered closed.

She wasn’t sure what the rules were, or could be, if her kiss was deadly to Adam. Her mouth, his mouth? A kiss seemed pretty straightforward — she thought if she bit his wrist, no one would think of it as one — and yet she could not seem to shake this nebulous haze of fear around anything to do with her mouth, or his. She let his thumb rest there, stroking gently, until it fell away. In another life, Blue would like to have pressed a kiss to the pad of his thumb, but that was not the life Blue led.

Blue put her unsure fingertips against his chest, below his shoulders, and touched him through the thin cotton of his cotton shirt, which was soft from long ownership and blue as the sky. He was bigger than he looked. She wondered if he was always hiding parts of himself, and drawing attention to others, like her. If he didn’t want people to notice how strong he was, how bulky. Blue was noticing. She stroked the globe of his shoulders, let her hands come down on the other side of his back, touching the muscles there.

“You’re so,” she said, not sure what to say. There were a lot of ways she could end that sentence. She thought back to the night all four of them had stopped at Ninos, and he’d come back. He’d said he didn’t just want to _pick her up_. She saw an image of that same boy now, as he bowed his head, like he was unsure of what she’d say to him. “Handsome,” she finished.

Adam flushed. “I think so too. I mean, not about me. About you! Not handsome.”

Blue laughed, and pressed her forehead to his. She liked that they were both sitting down, how she had access to him without stretching, or pulling him down. “I know what you meant,” she said. She felt hungry for him to touch her, and impatient. Cabeswater had paused time so that they could explore each other, and she still somehow felt like there wasn’t enough.

She lifted her hand from his tense back to the tendons of his neck, tracing them. He let out a long breath that she felt flutter against her neck.

“I wish I could kiss you,” he said, his voice low and scraping in a way that went straight to her stomach, stirring her insides like a spun wine glass.

“I know,” she said. “But you could touch me instead.”

Adam moved then, as if that was the permission he’d been waiting for. His fingers hesitated with only the tips of them under the hem of a shirt she had tie-dyed herself, but when she didn’t stop him — or whatever if/than he’d been holding his breath on — he skirted them across the line of her stomach, which Blue wanted immediately to keep happening. “Yes please,” she said, like it was a question. Adam touched up her sides in a way she used with unfamiliar and skittish cats — all knuckles and softly curved hands, and his knuckles dragged up the path of her ribcage before coming back down.

The hourglass still held all of the sand in the top half.

Blue could feel a damp pool between her legs, but felt too swept up in Adam’s touch to be embarrassed. Perhaps that would come later. With his hand still exploring her sides, she crowded into his space, relishing the delicious drag of his calloused palms, the tough tips of his fingers, and the fact that he was so gentle besides. She put herself close to him and he made a vee with his legs to accommodate her. She buried her face in his neck, feeling a brief surge of conviction that if she put her open mouth against Adam’s neck, it would be fine. Who would describe that as a kiss? She didn’t want to gamble with his life.

“Adam?” she whispered. “My mom sees pictures. Dreams. If she’d seen, you know, me, sucking on your neck, she wouldn’t have called that a kiss, would she? They always say _kiss._ ”

Adam groaned when she said the word _sucking._ She could feel it rumble through his neck. “That sounds safe,” he said.

Was that his brain or his hormones? He brain pleaded, _convince me_ but her hormones wanted to dive into him. He was _so still_ beneath her face. “Blue?” he finally asked.

He mother had always said, _if you kiss your true love._ She had never mentioned that she might want to grind on her true love in a magical forest, might want to skirt the technicalities of whatever curse she carried. Maura really had done her a disservice with her intent to remain as vague as possible.

Blue stopped thinking, licked her bottom lip, and pressed her open mouth to the junction of his neck, giving a quick suck. Adam made a delicious noise, and she tried it again, encouraged and thrilled.

“You’re going to leave a mark,” he gasped.

Blue stilled.

“I mean. Yes, by all means. But like. You’re still in the visible zone.”

Adam was going to take his shirt off. Blue knew it the instant he said it, and she scrambled back to give him the space to do it. While he pulled off his shirt, Blue was struck by the impulse to take off her own, but then backtracked. She did not necessarily want to be totally exposed here, Cabeswater’s blessing or not, but she did unhook her bra and pulled the straps out of her sleeves. Adam gazed at the little pile on their blanket, his tee shirt and her bra, lacy and small on top of that. She heard him swallow.

He was tan and warm. It was summer, and she wanted to climb on top of his and put her mouth against his neck, wanted him to cup her breasts beneath her shirt, wanted to pin him beneath her own hips to finally feel some pressure against the core of her, which was starting to ache with the way she wanted to rock against him, feel him through her yellow shorts, if he wanted that, too.

Blue climbed into his lap and shivered at the rightness of landing there. A quick stream of profanity escaped his lips as she collided against him, and she was aware in an instant that he was hard. It was a ticklish, hopeful surprise, and she pressed her mouth into his neck and coaxed his hands up under her shirt where he touches the sides of her breasts with that same skittish-cat stroke until she steered his hands and he rolled her nipple between his fingers in earnest. She sucked harder, ground down on him.

“You good?” she checked in at some point, panting a little. She, personally, was having a great time, aside from the fact that she had a sneaking suspicion that what they were doing would probably be called _dry humping_ which sounded gross. Other than that, though.

“Time of my life,” Adam confirmed. His arms were across the small of Blue’s back, and she leaned back just to feel the strength of them.

By the time Adam announced they had reached the algebra two portion of the afternoon, Blue felt ready to comply instead of squabbling with him.

She told Cabeswater, “I need that hourglass to fall at the regular speed of time!” in a loud, carrying voice to be sure, and Adam’s laughter spilled out golden and glowing.

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned for the two of them getting to have the sort of kissless but joyful intimacy that teenagers that are super into each other deserve.


End file.
